


I still love the people I’ve loved (even if I cross the street to avoid them)

by poetsandzombies



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Makeup, Mutual Pining, Pining, Post-Break Up, damn what even happened in this fic i have no idea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:42:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27962483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetsandzombies/pseuds/poetsandzombies
Summary: The way Richie Tozier saw it—and whether it was true or simply a manifestation of his own making, who's to say—people only got one real great love in their lifetime.(a post-breakup, makeup fic)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 8
Kudos: 62





	I still love the people I’ve loved (even if I cross the street to avoid them)

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't an important part of the story, but for context: this is a universe where Pennywise doesn't exist, but since he exists in alternate realities, there are shadows of those events and feelings. 
> 
> Also: the title is a quote from Uma Thurman

The way Richie Tozier saw it—and whether it was true or simply a manifestation of his own making, who's to say—people only got one _real_ great love in their lifetime. And it was the kind of love that you held onto or else lived the rest of your life alone because otherwise, you’d drag someone into your life who was so _different_ from them it left you wondering what your life _could_ have been. Or worse, you fell for someone who was similar— _so_ similar, that they were the thing that was _almost_ , but not quite, the thing that you wanted. And there was some convoluted word for that he'd heard before, what was it...? 

_Oh_ anyway, he'd been watching too much TV.

Richie could've made it easier on himself. He could have tried harder to like Millie with the spare pocket change in the fifth grade, or Becca in ninth, who'd sometimes followed him home in her floral skirts and knock-kneed legs, offering loud bursts of laughter off cue. He could have gotten the braces to shut him up and the glasses that didn't magnify his wandering eyes; he could have straightened his shirts more and saved himself the worried glances from his dad every time he left the house. 

Well, maybe not so much. But he still liked to think he _decided_ to love the boy next door. Maybe not that first day, when he'd flashed his mismatched socks from underneath his jeans and Eddie Kaspbrak's charmed smile left him reeling on the sidewalk on their way to school. But after so many years of slotting together like a two-piece jigsaw puzzle, the way Eddie's laughter followed Richie's jokes like an answer to a call, where his band-aid supplied hand was the one gentle touch he knew, he thought: _Who else? Who better?_ He carved out the grooves of his tragedy-adled love with a rusted knife and woke up every day since _choosing_ to love Eddie. Decided it was worth the trouble. 

Decided it was worth the heartbreak, too, when that came some fifteen-odd years later. It was worth the dull ache that had bruised low in his stomach over the last few days, and now the throb in the back of his head as he woke to the sound of loud shuffling and unapologetically familiar voices. 

"It's been a _week,_ what _is_ all this?"

"Th-that's just _Richie_." 

He buried his face further into the pillows, trying to block out the muffled criticisms, and braced himself for the long-awaited reunion with human contact, which inevitably came in the form of a firm hand on his shoulder. It was Bill Denbrough’s hand. He could tell by the smooth touch of his fingertips on his collarbone, and the way he rubbed his back soothingly afterword. 

"Don't tell me yuh-yuh-you've been in bed this whole time."

God, Richie wished he _had_ been; that this wasn't the first full night's rest he'd gotten in three days. But Richie couldn't have the breakup without the fixating, and he couldn't have the fixating without the distraction, and he couldn't have the distraction without the buggy, incessant reminder of the breakup he'd been distracting himself from fixating on. It was probably less maintenance to give a mouse a cookie.

Richie rolled over and cracked an eye open at Bill but didn’t answer, not wanting to explain the scrapped pencil list of shitty jokes, some of which had tapered off into disjointed bouts of slam poetry, and admit he'd lost his touch. Behind Bill, Beverly Marsh peered down at him with a mixture of amusement and concern—mostly amusement. She often had more faith in him than Bill, but Richie wasn't sure she should. 

"Wanna tell me why," Richie eventually said on a yawn, stretching out and glancing at the clock on his bedside table, "you're breaking and entering at nine in the morning?" 

Bill's soft expression dissipated into a scowl. "You gave me a key," he said defensively.

"For _emergencies_!" 

"What's this, then?" Bev asked, and gestured to the room. It was, admittedly, a little messy. Cluttered in the corners and on his desk by the window where he sometimes worked. He put away his laundry only half the time, so half-folded t-shirts and wrinkled jeans were strewn across his bed and over his chair. But it wasn’t _dirty_ , and that often made all the difference. At least, it did to Eddie Kaspbrak. 

“ _This_ ,” he said, gesturing between the three of them, “is an invasion of privacy. What if I’d been naked?”

Bill looked thoroughly unimpressed. “I’ve suh-seen you in worse.”

“Well, I’m _flattered_.” Richie rubbed his eyes and sat up with a hunch. Bill’s hand never left his body; it now rested on his thigh. The worry was in the lines of his face—lines he was way too young to have—and, wanting to rid him of it, Richie put his glasses on and met it with a serious look. “I _know_ it’s not the end of the world,” he told him softly.

It was absolutely the end of the world. The sky was opening up and hell was revealing itself, discolored and rotten.

But you didn’t tell your best friend it was the end of the world. Not when your best friend was Bill Denbrough, and carried the weight of it on his shoulders. He was a _fixer_ , as long as Richie’d known him, and you didn’t tell _fixers_ about the things they couldn’t fix.

It didn’t matter much anyway. Bill looked skeptical, but didn’t challenge him.

“Ah-alright. Then you’ll be okay to take a walk with us,” he said instead.

Richie hid a grimace in a stretch. “Where to?”

Bill hesitated. “Just…around town. You know, to rip the Band-Aid off.” 

He gave Richie a pained, apologetic expression and the nausea that’d been working its way up Richie’s throat all week was finally given a name.

Bill was asking for a walk-through of his relationship. A way to knock out as many _firsts-since-Eddie_ in one blow so that those memories weren’t walking in on him, unannounced, when he was trying to get shit done. It was deeply unsettling, the finality of the way it sounded.

And worst of all, Eddie had always been the one to put the band-aid _on_.

But Richie was nothing, apparently, if not ready at any given moment to follow Bill unto death, and so he showered, scrubbing the week’s cold misery from his hair until the water ran clear, and dressed himself in something he could hide in. A fabric the memories could not see him in. There weren’t many options, in _or_ out of his closet, but after about twenty minutes he had to admit that he might just be stalling.

The thing about it was—Eddie was in every part of this town. He was cemented into the foundation of these streets; built into the architecture, in every wall. Derry was as inseparable from Eddie as it was Bill, or Bev, or any of the other mismatched kids he’d grown up with.

They were waiting for him out in the living room when he finally emerged, dressed in jeans and a plain t-shirt and jacket, and he realized that Eddie was in every part of this _apartment_ as well: by the front door where he always left his shoes, in the carpet he’d once spent an afternoon on his back trying to fix Richie’s cable (which, as it turned out, he had just forgotten to pay the bill for).

Richie’s gaze fell onto the couch Bill was sitting on, where he wouldn’t again be able to tilt his head back against the armrest and look at the ceiling without remembering the _no, no, I want to, please_ dying into muffled laughter, further into soft and concentrated noises, the tickle of Eddie’s fingertips low on his stomach and the silence radiating from the television screen:

**Are you still watching?**

Richie swallowed the misery in his throat and hung his head low. “I need a new couch.”

Bill made some indistinguishable noise and stood up.

* * *

Their first stop was a small record store just down the street from the house he grew up in, only a couple blocks from where he lived now. It had opened sometime in their freshmen year of high school and remained to this day one of the newer businesses around town. Things liked to overstay their welcome here in Derry, Richie found, which left little space for newcomers.

The chime of the shopkeeper’s bell drowned into the sounds of Lenny Kravitz, but the lone teen at the register still glanced over at the three of them hovered in the doorway, probably looking like a couple of mid-twenties losers who’d overstayed their welcome. Which was not untrue.

The place seemed to have grown into itself in the years since Richie last came in—weathering its clean look down to a fade, wearing the dusted scent of the town on its shelves. Physically, it was the same; an open room aisled with tables of loosely organized albums and a record player by the windowed walls. It was busier back then, though.

Bev gave Richie’s shoulder a squeeze as she moved past him into the store. Bill gave him a nudge and he sighed and followed behind, flipping halfheartedly through the albums as he passed them. _Purple Rain_ and he was 16 again, acne-ridden standing in his mud-soaked converse until the shop owner kicked him out. _Disintegration_ and he was smacking Ben over the head for flipping past The Cure without recognition. _Document_ and he was sliding dimes and pennies across the nicked-up countertop.

Richie would often drop by in the evenings after school because it was on the way home and he had time to kill, but that _first_ day he’d gone with Eddie in search of a birthday present for Bill. There was somewhat of a gap between their music tastes, polite but firm, yet Eddie’d let Richie drag him over to the record player and put those used, pizza-greased headphones over his head—even if he grimaced and pulled them an inch away from his ears.

“You’ll never like Leaf Hound like that,” Richie had said, pressing the headphones back down over Eddie’s ears, his face in his hands. He couldn’t hear the music, but knew every note by heart and mouthed along, bobbing his head to dead air. Eddie had watched him, amused and smiling, and nodded on with him until Richie got dizzy looking at him and turned away to buy Bill’s gift. Later, Eddie’s tell him he only ever let Richie do that because it gave him a good five minutes free of Richie’s talking.

They hadn’t even been _together_ then, and that was another thing; Eddie had been Richie’s friend long before he’d ever been his boyfriend. There were only a couple of years Richie could even _remember_ a life Eddie wasn’t a part of, and they’d all been spent mixing up his colors and asking his mom to tie his shoelaces.

As drastic as it sounded, he imagined if he was being asked to start over that he would just revert back to that time, trying to relearn the prism of the world without an Eddie in it. ~~~~

He looked down and realized he’d been gripping hold of a UFO album for who knows how long. And not even one of the _good_ ones. With a huff of frustration, he shoved it back in the milk crate and walked out.

Bill followed him some moments later and they stood on the curb, balancing their feet over the edge as they waited for Bev to make a purchase. In the cushioned silence between he and a man that perhaps knew him better than anyone else did, he had the choice between a bad joke or the brutal admission of his misery. But the misery hung in the vulnerable slump of his shoulders, so he said nothing, letting his throat burn up with a craving he hadn’t had in years.

“I get it, you know,” Bill said after a while, and Richie turned to see that he’d been watching him. “You know that I do.”

Richie knew that, in some ways, Bill _did_ know. He saw the way he looked at their friend Mike Hanlon, the way that _Richie_ had looked at Eddie for all those years. When he thought no one could see. The same sad and painful longing for someone he thought could never…could _never_ …

But in other ways, he didn’t. He hadn’t yet known how “I love you” looked on Mike’s lips, or the way his skin felt after midnight. He hadn’t fallen asleep planning a future with someone, and then woken up to the cold empty side of his bed.

He didn’t get a chance to answer before he was saved by the chime of the record shop door and Bev came out with an album wrapped up in a plastic bag.

“Hey, Bev,” Richie called over to her, patting the pockets of his pants by habit. “You got a cowboy killer?”

Bev gave him a capital L _Look_ as she approached them, indiscernible with her squinting from the sun.

“Not for you, I don’t.”

“Christ,” Richie hissed. Shook his head. “Was there actually a time when smoking was fun? Now it’s just…” He gestured vaguely.

“An addiction?” Bev offered, raising an eyebrow.

Richie grinned. “Who’da thunk it?”

And this resurfaced another memory, in the lamplight of some late evening on the corner of the sidewalk, just a few blocks from where he was standing now. Richie was twenty then—walking home with Eddie from his birthday dinner, in fact—and had stopped before crossing the street to bite on the end of a loose cigarette he found in his jacket pocket, fishing around for a lighter while Eddie shifted from foot to foot.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Rich,” he’d said on a sigh, and when Richie had turned to look at him, he was looking down at the ground.

Richie had been smoking since he was ten years old, and until then, Eddie had _never_ said anything to him about it. Never. And yet he’d sounded so sad, unaccusing, almost like he was more frustrated with himself.

Richie was shaken from the memory with a soft thud against his chest, just in time to catch the bag that Bev was handing over.

“Don’t let a boy get in the way of you and a good album,” she told him. “You’re really bumming me out.”

* * *

They spent the rest of the afternoon like this, walking the small town Richie and his close-knit group of friends had all grown up in—the town they’d never left. _Always meant to, eventually_ , he thought to himself. But time slipped quietly beneath the soles of their feet, and they felt unrushed. Compelled by subliminal fear to overstay their welcome, tethered to…something. And time just kept on going.

There were seven of them in total. A complete circle of seven; distinct, unyielding. Richie imagined that it would be like this, retracing the skeleton of their town, if any one of them had decided to leave.

But now it was just Richie, seeking out the squares of sidewalk that made him feel particularly raw. They stopped going inside after a while, and he let the memories come back to him in easy, vivid shades—reliving them like the way he could think of a lemon drop and taste the sweet and sour on the back of his tongue.

He scrunched his face up and tasted Eddie _everywhere_ , sweet on the steps of Derry’s public library where he first taught him 52 pickup, sour on the west end of Kansas street from the first real fight they ever had. He couldn’t imagine there’d ever be a day it wouldn’t feel as intense as this, as painful, but he swallowed it down anyways, quiet as he’d ever been as Bev and Bill talked around him, until they reached the street across from the local movie theater.

Richie halted on the edge of the sidewalk and frowned at the worn, slanted building across from him. There was a time this place would have been _packed_ , back in high school. There was only so many things that kept kids out of the hairs of their parents in Derry and on Tuesday nights, matinee prices stretched well into the night and concession was 15% off.

Its business had dwindled, since then. Newer theaters had sprouted around town, in newer buildings with newer seats. They played newer movies. But Richie sort of liked the lumpy chairs and smell of stale popcorn, and his friends still came here every Tuesday—a couple of oversized teenagers elbowing themselves into the kids they once were.

He could almost _see_ them all now, from his spot across the street, stumbling hurriedly over each other out of the theater doors and onto the pavement in fits of nervous laughter after a showing of Night of the Living Dead. Richie’s friends didn’t like horror much—at _all_ , if he was being honest with himself. They wondered out loud why they’d do that to themselves after “what had happened to them.”

Although, none of them had really known what they _meant_ by that.

They’d agreed to one _old_ , cheesy horror flick just that one night, though, and were rewarded with Richie staggering out after them at a slow, uneasy pace; arms outstretched, mouth hung open like his jaw was broken. Eddie trailed behind the others when he stopped suddenly to dig his wallet out of his pocket—because there was _always_ a moment between the theater and the parking lot where he suddenly realized the potential he had to have left his possessions behind—and Richie caught up to him.

He let his arms fall lazily, draping them over Eddie’s shoulders. And Eddie, to his surprise, didn’t push him away. So they walked like that, bundled together and knocking feet, following behind their friends, until the scent of Eddie’s shampoo was so thick in Richie’s throat he had to pull off of him.

Eddie turned back to him, frowning slightly, as Richie started fishing around in all of his pockets.

“Hey,” he called out to the others after a moment. “We’ll catch up, okay?”

And he watched as Richie pulled a pack of Marlboros and a lighter out of his jacket, fingers numb and fumbling in the cold. Richie could _feel_ his eyes on him, watching him struggle, until their friends were nearly out of sight, and offered a shaky laugh as Eddie approached him. Took the cigarette out from between his fingers and the lighter out of his left hand with quiet, gentle ease. Richie furrowed his brows and wondered briefly, in the haze of Eddie’s shampoo and proximity, if he was going to _smoke_ the cigarette.

It had been a good year for Eddie; he’d graduated college (a semester earlier than the others), taken a job offer just on the outskirts of town, and finally moved out of his mother’s house, out of her grasp. And that had been hard, Richie knew. But Eddie didn’t look back, and he wondered if maybe he was thinking _fuck it,_ what’s he got to lose?

But Eddie didn’t light the cigarette. Wasn’t even looking at it. He was still watching Richie, had been watching him this whole time, as though waiting for him to move or snatch the lighter back or…

Richie stood very still. He remembered this. He remembered this. The road stretched on and on between him and that version of himself and he felt so far away from it, from that moment. From Eddie. Yet could not forget the cracked lightning in his legs when Eddie had reached up to wrap his arms around his neck, the almost audible _click_ he’d heard when Eddie had fit himself into Richie’s space, like he belonged there.

Richie had been kissed before that night. Only a few times, and never very well. But this might as well have been his first. He remembered feeling like he could _will_ it to be, that’s how badly he wanted it. Eddie had kissed him, and his mouth had been soft and his hands had been kind and Richie felt almost _ashamed_ to have known anyone else’s mouth before Eddie’s.

“Sorry,” Eddie’d said when he eventually pulled away—slowly, hesitantly. “I thought I was going to die if I didn’t do that soon.”

Richie couldn’t recall if he’d ever found his voice again that night. But he could remember pulling Eddie into another kiss, as sweet as the last, because he thought the world might tip over if he got too carried away.

It had been a good year for Eddie, and it had only got better after that.

It was only in these last few months that things began to unravel. Eddie’s mother had fallen ill in the summer, thrusting herself back into Eddie’s life with a violence like an undercurrent, and by winter everything was up in the air. The hospital visits were long and painful, filled with cold coffee, stiff chairs, the lilting wail of Sonia Kaspbrak ricocheting through the hallways as she fought ruthlessly with her son.

Richie stopped coming after a while. It was hard to see Eddie like that. There was more to it than the slow, inevitable reverting back into himself. There was also the _anger_ —a cold and bitter thing lining old habits, old complacencies. Richie didn’t know it, and he didn’t understand it.

The one thing Eddie _never_ did in those months was try to accommodate Sonia’s loud reservations about Richie by hiding him away, and he was at least grateful for that. But at home, he kissed him less. Left a cushion space between them on the couch. Inched further and further towards the edge of the bed when they slept.

In these ways, Richie could feel him slipping away. Fading, fading, and eventually, gone.

He shook his head and tried get back to the _good_ memories, but when he looked across the street again, the others were gone. There was only the quiet, whispered frame of Eddie buying tickets at the kiosk, his back turned to Richie. A snapshot of their future.

He blinked to rid himself of the vision, but Eddie remained. Blinked again, but he remained and remained, and Richie found himself crossing the street before he knew what he was doing, closing in on his memories.

He hit the pavement just as Eddie was turning around and he was real, _real_ , the cold-blushed skin and his freckles in earnest. Had his head bowed to the tickets in his hands and his eyebrows drawn together as he read them.

How did a week feel like a lifetime?

“They’re not playing any movies in theater four, so I…” he trailed off when he finally looked up and saw Richie hovering awkwardly in front him, unable to speak or move. His mouth turned down in confusion, and then softened.

“Hey,” he said, shoving his hands in his coat pockets, and his voice was unexpectedly kind. Surprised. “What are you doing here?”

Richie couldn’t look away from him, couldn’t understand the body in front of him, but his mouth moved on autopilot.

“You can’t tell?” he asked. He tried to make it light, but his voice fell short and his jaw hung loosely over the last word. “I’m on my breakup tour.”

Eddie laughed, somewhat nervously, and shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, hugging his jacket tighter around him as a gust of wind blew between their stilted, standing bodies. “Yeah, I guess I am too.”

“Small world,” Richie offered.

“Nosy friends,” Eddie countered. “I was with…” he looked around suddenly, and Richie followed his gaze, until they found their friends a couple feet away from them. _All_ of them. Bev and Stan seemed to be bickering under their breath, and Ben was stealing cautious, worried glances over at Richie and Eddie every couple seconds.

“Well there ya go,” Richie said after a moment.

“I don’t think this was part of their plan,” Eddie mused.

Richie hummed. “No, probably not.”

And they fell into silence after that, and their friends hung back, and nobody seemed to know what to do. Richie wanted to disappear—wanted to close the door and try again. He felt stiff and outside of his body, out of touch with the nerves that knew that this was _just_ Eddie.

The same way that he was _just_ Richie, that they were _just_ Richie and Eddie. All he knew was the part where they were _Richie and Eddie_ , the twenty-year-old secret hidden in elbow crooks and pillowcases—existing worried on their friend’s faces, unrequited on Richie’s mouth. A development in Eddie’s lungs.

The part that might have ruined the whole of it.

Eddie was the one to break the silence.

“I, um.” He frowned, and couldn’t seem to look back at Richie. “I have these…” He stared down at the tickets in his hands, boring holes into them with his eyes. “I have these. Did. Did you maybe want to…”

He let out a sigh of frustration, and that at least kicked Richie into action.

“Might as well, huh?” he said, smile broadening. “Can’t get any weirder.”

So Eddie slipped the extra two ticket’s he’d bought to their friends, all of them compensating with questioning looks, and Richie followed him inside, feeling large and wishing he had more to do with his hands. It was dead inside—unsurprising—and Eddie hovered awkwardly by the dim corridor of theaters. He looked like he was trying to figure something out.

Shame Richie couldn’t kiss him then. A week ago, he would have.

But that was an alarming and unwelcome thought, so he distracted himself with his own voice, and a question that had been forming in the back of his throat since he’d first seen Eddie.

“What’s in theater four?”

“What?” Eddie looked up at him, puzzled, then made a quiet _O_ of understanding with his lips. “Oh. You don’t know?”

Richie shook his head and Eddie hesitated, stern contemplation on his face, then led him down the hall and into the open quiet of theater number four, lit dimly by faded lights, where the muffled sounds of some action-thriller from a neighboring theater could be heard through the walls.

Eddie climbed the stairs up to roughly the middle row and sat three seats in. Richie hung back by the front, a foot on the first step, watching him carefully. Eddie seemed to forget where he was for a moment, staring off in front of him, lost in thought. He’d done that a lot, growing up. More so than Richie even.

“This is where I knew I was going to kiss you,” he said finally, and it caught Richie off guard. His eyes moved away from the large, empty screen to his pained expression. “Like, **_really_** knew, Rich.”

“What?” Richie croaked.

“I mean, there was the year or two where I thought I’d wanted to, you know,” he went on. “And then the couple months when I _knew_ I wanted to.” He paused. “But here I knew that I could. That I could, and that I _would_.”

Richie followed Eddie’s voice up the stairs, legs somewhat wobbly, and took the seat next to him. He thought about his own memory, outside on the pavement, but quietly shooed it and let Eddie tell his.

“I sat next to you here. Exactly here, I think.” He looked around at the seats on either side of him as though they had a definitive answer for him. “There’s not really a reason, I don’t think. There’s not always a reason. You know? That’s just how long it took for me to get there. I…I wanted to kiss you at the bottom of those stairs, and decided to do it in this seat.”

“You never told me that before,” Richie said softly, unsure of what else to say. He’d told Eddie everything, when they’d first gotten together. Spent hours in bed tracing the outlines of his love story, the places where he’d written Eddie’s name. But Eddie never talked about himself, how it had happened for him. And Richie never asked.

“I know. I just—I wanted to say sorry.” He turned his head and pressed it to Richie’s shoulder. Richie stiffened before inevitably melting into it. “Sorry it took so long. And sorry for…for…” he lolled his head back over his seat, losing the thought. “But this is so _stupid_ ,” he blurted suddenly, waving his hands around. “Cirque De Soleil could preform here and it wouldn’t make a difference. This will _always_ be the place I kissed you.” He took a breath and let it out with a huff. “ _So_ stupid,” he repeated, quieter. To himself.

Richie agreed, but couldn’t make himself say it out loud. He was hung up on the rest of it. The small window into Eddie’s feelings he was being invited in through but knew he couldn’t dwell in without getting stuck.

“We should go home,” he said after a while. “It’s getting dark.”

He could see the faint outline of Eddie making a face. “We’re in a _movie theater_.”

“And you know what? I’m starting to think there’s no post-credits scene after all.” He leapt out of his seat and took the stairs two at a time. “What are we paying the extra fifty cents for?”

“Richie…” 

“Inflation?!”

“ _Richie_ —”

The cool air on Richie’s warm, overstimulated skin helped to clear his head, and he hung back to let Eddie catch up to him. Their friends were gone and Eddie came out with a justified scowl on his face.

“Sorry,” Richie said sincerely. _I don’t know what our new normal is,_ he wanted to say. But he was afraid Eddie would tell him that their new normal was nothing. And then what? It was _really_ over. “Walk home with me?”

They would have been walking with an awkward distance between them in the same direction otherwise, so Eddie tucked himself into his jacket and walked alongside Richie, their shoulders bumping lightly every now and then. The distance felt much shorter with Eddie by his side, rather than in the walls and nooks of their town, punctuated by the fear that the end of it would be the end of Eddie.

It got easier as they walked, as they talked, as they forgot they were two people who were together once, until there were moments where they seemed to forget they were broken up at all. And then Eddie’s hand would brush Richie’s and he’d yank it back, and they’d remember all over again.

Richie and Eddie hadn’t been _only friends_ in almost four years. In those four years, Richie had given in to believing, had given in to settling in and now, he couldn’t remember how it was before. When Eddie shivered from the cold, could he touch him? Could he offer him his jacket? Could—

“Are you cold?” Eddie asked amidst a stretch of quiet, and it startled Richie out of his thoughts. He looked down at his tightly folded arms and realized _he_ was the one who was shivering so bad.

“We’re just a few blocks away,” he said. “What were you gonna do, give me your jacket?”

“Well—”

“You think I could pull off the cropped look?”

Eddie snorted, but reached out and touched his arm delicately with a hand warm from his own pocket, which did virtually nothing except make Richie’s stomach flutter helplessly.

“I’d have to see it.”

Richie paused and turned to him, and Eddie reached out with his other hand and started to rub his upper arms with a natural, almost inevitability. Richie watched him, the warmth blooming instead from his chest, and Eddie smiled.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

But Eddie’s smile widened, and something shifted—in the air, and in his body. And Richie could read Eddie well, but he was afraid to read this. Afraid to read it and be wrong, and what would it mean if he were wrong?

He smiled back and cautiously leant down. Only a _little_ , only a question, but Eddie answered it with a tilted, upturned chin. He seemed to stretch, only as much as body could with feet still planted firmly on the ground, and his hands stopped moving on Richie’s arms. Gripped his elbows.

The moment ended when Richie pulled away, and Eddie relaxed back into himself, looking around like he was lost. They walked again.

By the time they reached the steps leading up to his front door, Richie felt desperate not to let Eddie slip away again.

“Do you want to come in? I have coffee.”

“I could drink coffee,” Eddie said, staggered.

Another moment unraveled, in the entanglement of their bodies in the foyer, as Eddie struggled out of his jacket, and Richie tried to help him. Once freed, Eddie leaned back against the wall with a quiet breath, and Richie hung his jacket up before looking back at him in a sort of _now what_. Eddie met his eyes and his face softened and they spent a few seconds just _looking_ , just looking at each other like that, until Eddie’s gaze drifted and he sighed.

“We should talk,” he said slowly.

But he was giving Richie his bedroom eyes. His earnest, embarrassed fixation on Richie’s mouth whenever he wanted sex, but wasn’t going to ask for it. It made Richie’s knees weak—he hadn’t seen that look in over a month, and wondered if Eddie even realized he was doing it. Oftentimes he knew, but couldn’t seem to help it.

Richie nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed. Swallowed. “Or we could do that later.”

Eddie’s eyes flicked up. “Oh,” he said.

“Maybe in the morning…” Richie could feel his heart low in his stomach.

“Yeah,” Eddie said breathlessly. “Yeah, okay.”

He settled back on Richie’s lips, but didn’t make a move, and Richie stood motionless; cold, hopeful, worried, desperate, terrified, in love and out of place. And when Eddie didn’t look away, he took his face in his hands and kissed him.

What was the worst that could happen?

Eddie kissed him back, and the gentle press of his tongue against Richie’s bottom lip gave him over to a quiet recklessness, his hands falling down to Eddie’s shoulders, to his hips. He kissed him with the memory of losing him, with the desperation to get him back. Eddie gave back every _touch_ , every _kiss_ , and he gave and he gave and he gave until Richie was weak and falling to his knees, apologizing for it all with the palms of his hands on his back, begging for forgiveness with his mouth open against the soft cotton of his shirt. 

“What do you want, baby, please just—” Richie gripped the back of Eddie’s shirt tightly, in near hysterics “—I’d…I’ll do whatever you want me to.”

Eddie put a hand in Richie’s hair, voice strangled. “God, I…I don’t care. Just you, Richie, I just want _you._ ”

He bent over Richie’s kneeling frame and ran his hands over his back soothingly, and with no apparent struggle at all, Richie picked him up off the floor and through awkwardly placed kisses pulled him away from the front door, where it wasn’t so painful.

He’d carry him to his room, where hysteria would dissolve into laughter, the way that all their best sex was had. Spread him out on the bed where they first decided they loved each other enough to withstand the potential cataclysm that awaited them between the bedsheets, back when Richie thought his naked body was the worst he had to offer. The bed where he first learned how to _be_ with Eddie, how to touch him—the best ways. Beneath the covers that _knew_ , and could guide him through it again. And again and again and again.

* * *

Richie woke to a comfortable ache in his legs, and an empty bed. But he was only given a half of a moment to panic before he heard familiar sounds of vigorous teeth brushing. He rolled onto his back with a content sigh and made out faces in the popcorn of his ceiling while he listened the squeaky faucet, the running water, and finally soft sticky padding of footsteps from the bathroom tiles out onto the carpet.

“You kept my toothbrush.”

Richie grinned to the ceiling. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, voice hoarse. He turned his cheek into the pillow. “It’s only been a week.”

Eddie looked sleepy and relaxed in the shirt Richie wore last night, hair soft and rumpled. His freckles were always the darkest in the morning, and Richie swore he’d gotten more since he’d last seen him. More places for Richie to kiss.

“Hi,” Eddie said as he came over to him, eyes low and cheeks pink.

“Hi,” Richie echoed, reaching his arm out to him. Eddie took his hand in both of his own and kissed his palm, kissed his wrist, spreading hesitant relief through his fingertips.

“Hi,” Eddie said again, and smiled. He perched a knee up on the edge of the mattress and slid the other over Richie’s waist, settling into his lap. Richie had never felt so human in his entire life, but he couldn’t look away from him. It was just Eddie and Richie and his bed, and anything else about it didn’t have to matter right now.

Except, of course it did. Because it had to.

But when Eddie opened his mouth next, and Richie heard something along the lines of _about last night_ through the thunder in his ears, he couldn’t help the way he groaned over it, gripping Eddie’s thighs and rolling them over to press Eddie into the mattress.

“Do you want breakfast?” he asked. “I can make you breakfast.”

Eddie laughed, but there was an edge of frustration to it. “Richie, c’mon.”

“Hmm?” Richie hummed innocently, and Eddie’s smile faded into a scowl, his eyebrows pinched. Richie pulled away from him so that they could settle into their own sides of the bed, facing each other on their sides. Close, but not entangled.

He knew he was only making things more difficult for Eddie. That this wasn’t easy for him to begin with either. 

“Christ, Rich, we’ve seen each other naked. Can you not _talk_ to me for five minutes?”

Richie wanted to argue that talking was a thousand times more embarrassing than the other thing, but he was really in no position to do so. He still had no idea what last night meant, or if he was capable of fucking it up.

“Five minutes?” he managed weakly, and Eddie sighed in relief.

“I will make it as painless as possible,” he promised.

Richie swallowed the rising burn in his throat and nodded quietly. Eddie sat up. He looked around the room for a few long moments, like he was seeing it for the first time, or trying to memorize it.

“You…” he started finally, shook his head and tried again. “I could see what I was doing. You think I didn’t know? I knew.” His throat bobbed visibly. “I was back in my head again, I couldn’t read you. Like in high school, you know, I was just…spiraling all the time. And you stopped coming.” He paused and looked away from his hands to meet Richie’s quiet gaze. “I was acting crazy, and you stopped coming. I thought…”

He shrugged and Richie turned to bury his face in his pillow, his own memories of the last few months crawling back to him. The cold and distant presence of Eddie, quiet and unshakable. Richie had only been trying to give him space.

“Eddie, I _never_ —” he started, but couldn’t finish what he was trying to say and besides, there was no way to say it. “You never asked.”

He didn’t mean for it to sound so accusatory, but Eddie scoffed.

“ _I_ never? _You_ never!” he scrubbed his face over his hands irritably and Richie reached out and touched his bare thigh for comfort. “God, you are just _so_ afraid of knowing things, you end up losing more than you need to.”

Richie clenched his jaw tightly to fight his own defense. He was right anyhow; Richie would rather walk the town of his childhood mourning the loss of his best friend than even chance hearing out loud that Eddie didn’t want him anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured after a stretch of silence. “I’m sorry.”

Eddie took the hand resting on his thigh and brought it up to his mouth. He didn’t kiss it, but pressed it to his lips and took a deep breath, like it was helping him think. After a while he fell back onto the pillows, seemed to ask the ceiling a question, and then turned back to face Richie, eyes soft and concerned.

“I’m losing my mom, Rich,” he croaked. “And I know you don’t really get it. But I need you, okay? You are the single most…I just _need_ you. If you can hang on for these next couple of months—”

“I love you,” Richie interrupted. “You know that? You were the first person I ever loved. I’m not going anywhere, alright? I never want to be across the street from you again. I’m not…I’m not going _anywhere_.”

_Where would I even go? I have nowhere to go. You are everywhere._ He had to close his eyes and pretend he was only saying the first part in his head, but the look on Eddie’s face told him he had managed it out loud.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Eddie warned, like that changed anything for Richie at all. But he looked settled now, more relaxed in Richie’s bed, and eventually moved over to tuck himself into Richie’s side. “I have three missed calls from Ben.”

Richie was worn out, and emotionally exhausted from the week’s events, and grateful for Eddie in more ways than he could count. He slid a hand up his t-shirt and pressed his fingers to the warm skin of Eddie’s hip, just to know that he was really there.

“I have ten from Bill,” he said. It was barely noon.

Eddie looked briefly alarmed before tugging Richie over him pulling him down into a kiss. “I think they’ll live another hour,” he said against his mouth.

“Yeah?” Richie said hopefully, burrowing himself into Eddie and kissing down to his neck.

“Or two,” Eddie said, a small hitch in his breath.

And two became three, and three became four, until Richie got so lost in Eddie’s touches he forgot to worry about how his own silly little definitions of love fit over other people’s—if he wasn’t Eddie’s One Great Love, but his _almost, but not quite_. Maybe he didn’t love that way. And then Eddie was kissing the crook of his elbow, and it didn’t really matter anymore. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: trashmouthkid


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